Tweetie, a brand-new $3 iPhone Twitter client by Loren Brichter, is now available from the App Store. I’ve been using beta versions for a few weeks, and it is currently my favorite iPhone Twitter client by far. Tweetie shares a few conceptual similarities with Tweetsville, another very good new iPhone Twitter client — both take a very different approach than the king of the hill, Twitterrific.

The biggest difference is that both Tweetie and Tweetsville support loading additional tweets from further back in your timeline when you get to the end of the list. This makes it possible to “catch up” with older tweets in a way that just isn’t possible with Twitterrific. Tweetie also makes it possible to view individual users’ timelines within the app, using a left-to-right “drilling down” metaphor that allows you to go back to where you were. Tweetie wins out over Tweetsville by being faster, more stable (Tweetsville seems to more frequently run into low-memory situations when showing inline web views), and offering a more carefully thought out interface. The only thing I dislike about Tweetie is the SMS/iChat-style tweet list.

Thank you for the comment. The accent comes and goes, at times it’s more noticeable than others. Being born and living in a non-English speaking country for 18 years will do that.

Do you attribute that to the industry you are in or the age/experience/habits of the staff? Do younger staff members print less?

Also you (almost) completely lost Serbian accent in 10 years - didn’t think I would hear that.

We have these 30-40 page audit reports (accompanied by another 30-40 pages of excel worksheets) that we do, review and send to clients. These things get printed out at least 3 times before they go out. First time the reviewers like to print it so that they can make corrections using pen, pencil and highlighters. Then they go back and edit it, and send it for a second review. It gets printed again. The final version gets stored on the network drive, then printed and filed in a paper file cabinet. Also some clients like to receive paper copies of these reports via snail mail in addition to electronic copies (probably so that they don’t have to print them themselves). We are so far away from being green or paperless it is not even funny.

Also my desk is considered an avalanche danger zone due to the stacks of papers, boxes and CD cases that are piled up in there. I clean it up every once in a while but it gets messy really quickly.

I’m starting to wonder what kind of system are medical records and personal information stored on if they can’t provide something as simple as a failover or any kind of redundancy for their customer information system.

Let me see. The back end is an ancient legacy system written in/for PICK which is emulated on a dusty Linux server running an outdated version of Red Hat. The front end is written in ASP.NET and is running on an IIS server. The communication between the PICK back end and .NET front end is facilitated by mess of old VBA scripts which open socket connections and send telnet commands over the network, and then screen-scrape for output. And yes, stuff like that exists and is still used today.

Alternatively the back end is written in MUMPS.

I mean it is just a guess based on what I have seen running out there in the wild. Medical field is an… odd place when comes to software development. It may carry over to medical insurance field as well.